A Step-by-Step Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Your Plastic Surgery Website's SEO

This framework is built for two audiences: practice owners who want to understand why their site isn't generating consistent consultation requests, and in-house marketing directors who need a structured way to evaluate current SEO performance before briefing an agency or making a budget case internally.

It is not a beginner's introduction to what SEO is — if you need that foundation first, the plastic surgeon SEO hub covers the basics. This diagnostic assumes you already know your site exists but aren't sure why it isn't performing.

You'll get the most out of this framework if you:

• Have access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics (or can get it set up before starting)
• Can view your site's source code or have a developer who can
• Are willing to be honest about content quality — most practices find this section the most uncomfortable
• Have 2-3 hours to run through all four audit layers properly

One honest note: a self-audit surfaces issues, but it doesn't always reveal root causes. A technical error in your site's crawl configuration, for example, might look like a content problem in Search Console. If you complete this audit and the findings don't match your intuition about what's wrong, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

Technical SEO is the foundation. A beautifully written procedure page that Google can't crawl or index ranks nowhere. Start here before evaluating anything else.

Crawlability and Indexation

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Coverage report. You're looking for pages in the Excluded or Error buckets that shouldn't be there. Common offenders in plastic surgery sites include procedure pages accidentally blocked by a robots.txt rule, or pages marked noindex by a plugin that was never configured correctly.

Run a site search in Google: site:yourdomain.com. Count the indexed pages. If the number is significantly lower than the number of pages on your site, you have an indexation problem.

Page Speed

Use Google's PageSpeed Insights (free) and test your homepage and at least two procedure pages. Cosmetic surgery sites are notorious for slow load times because of large before-and-after image galleries. A Core Web Vitals failure on mobile is a direct ranking disadvantage.

Flag any page scoring below 50 on mobile as critical. Scores between 50-70 are moderate. Above 70 is acceptable but worth monitoring.

Mobile Usability

Check the Mobile Usability report in Search Console. Any errors here — tap targets too close together, content wider than screen — affect the majority of your visitors. In our experience working with cosmetic surgery practices, mobile traffic routinely represents the majority of site visits, yet mobile usability errors are among the most common findings in technical audits.

HTTPS and Core Security

Confirm your entire site serves over HTTPS. Mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loaded on an HTTPS page) can trigger browser warnings that erode patient trust immediately — especially damaging for a healthcare practice. Use a browser developer console to check for mixed content on key pages.

For most single-location plastic surgery practices, local SEO drives more consultation requests than organic rankings. The Map Pack — the three business listings that appear above organic results for searches like "rhinoplasty surgeon near me" — is prime real estate worth auditing separately.

Google Business Profile (GBP) Completeness

Log in to your GBP dashboard and work through this checklist:

• Primary category set to Plastic Surgeon (not a generic medical category)
• Secondary categories added where relevant (e.g., Medical Spa, Cosmetic Surgeon)
• All services listed with descriptions
• Business hours current and holiday hours updated
• At least 10 photos uploaded, including interior, exterior, and team photos — not before-and-after photos on GBP, which carries compliance risk under FTC guidelines and state medical board rules (verify current rules with your licensing authority)
• Q&A section seeded with common patient questions
• Website URL and phone number match exactly what's on your site

NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. Inconsistencies across directories — even minor ones like "Suite 400" vs "Ste. 400" — can dilute local authority signals. Use a tool like BrightLocal or Moz Local to scan your citation profile. Flag any inconsistency as moderate; flag missing listings on major directories (Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Yelp, Bing Places) as critical.

Review Velocity and Rating

Google considers both the volume and recency of reviews. A practice with 200 reviews but none in the past six months signals less activity than one with 80 reviews and three new ones this month. Note your current review count, average rating, and the date of your most recent review. If you haven't received a new Google review in more than 30 days, your review generation process needs attention.

Content is where most plastic surgery sites lose ground to competitors without realizing it. The problem isn't usually that practices have no content — it's that the content they have doesn't match what patients are searching for, or doesn't give Google enough substance to rank confidently.

Procedure Page Depth

Pull up your top five procedure pages — rhinoplasty, breast augmentation, liposuction, tummy tuck, facelift, or whatever your core services are. Read each one honestly. Ask:

• Does this page answer the questions a first-time patient would have, including recovery time, cost range, candidacy, and risks?
• Is it written in plain language, or is it dense with clinical terminology that patients don't search for?
• Is it at least 600-800 words of substantive content, or is it a few paragraphs padded with stock phrases?
• Does it have a clear path to booking a consultation?

Any procedure page that fails two or more of these questions is a moderate issue. A page that fails all four is critical.

Keyword Alignment

Open Google Search Console's Performance report and filter by page. Look at which queries are triggering impressions for each procedure page. If your rhinoplasty page is getting impressions for a keyword but ranking on page three or four, the page has relevance but not enough authority or depth. If it's getting no impressions at all for the target keyword, it's either not indexed or not topically aligned.

Duplicate and Thin Content

Run your site through Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) and check for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions — a common issue when practices use website templates that auto-generate titles. Duplicate content across procedure pages confuses Google about which page to rank.

Compliance Note

Before-and-after content, testimonials, and any claims about procedure outcomes on your site must align with FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and your state medical board's advertising rules. This is educational content, not legal or compliance advice — verify specific requirements with your healthcare attorney or licensing authority.

Authority, in SEO terms, is largely determined by who links to you. A backlink from a credible, relevant source tells Google that your site is trusted. A backlink profile made up of low-quality directory spam tells Google the opposite.

Backlink Profile Audit

Use Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz (all have free tiers with limited data) to export your backlink profile. Look for:

• Referring domain count: How many unique domains link to you? For a plastic surgery practice competing in a major metro market, industry benchmarks suggest that practices with stronger local rankings typically have meaningfully more referring domains than those stuck on page two or three — though exact thresholds vary by market competition and site age.
• Link relevance: Are the linking sites related to healthcare, aesthetics, local news, or community organizations? Or are they generic link farms?
• Toxic links: Any links from clearly spammy or adult-content sites should be flagged for disavowal consideration.

E-E-A-T Signals On-Page

Google's quality evaluator guidelines place heavy weight on Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for healthcare sites — a category where plastic surgery firmly belongs. Audit your site for:

• Surgeon bio pages with board certifications, training, and professional memberships clearly stated
• Author attribution on any educational blog or FAQ content
• Clear contact information, physical address, and credentials on every page
• Privacy policy and terms of service pages that are current and accessible

Missing or thin surgeon credentials pages are flagged as critical on YMYL healthcare sites. Google's quality raters actively evaluate whether the person providing medical information is qualified to do so.

Running a full audit generates a list of issues. Without a prioritization framework, practices tend to fix what's easiest rather than what matters most. Use this scoring approach:

Critical (Fix Within 30 Days)

• Pages that should be indexed are not indexed
• Core Web Vitals failures on mobile for key procedure pages
• Google Business Profile in wrong category or missing key information
• Surgeon credentials and qualifications not clearly visible on the site
• No HTTPS or active mixed-content warnings
• Procedure pages with fewer than 300 words of substantive content

Moderate (Address Within 60-90 Days)

• NAP inconsistencies across directories
• Review velocity below one new review per month
• Procedure pages ranking on page two or three with good impressions but low clicks
• Duplicate title tags or meta descriptions across procedure pages
• Backlink profile with fewer than 20 unique referring domains in a competitive market

Low (Schedule for Next Quarter)

• Blog content that is outdated but not inaccurate
• Secondary pages with moderate PageSpeed scores (50-70)
• Missing schema markup (FAQ schema, LocalBusiness schema)
• Q&A section on GBP not seeded

When to Stop DIY and Bring in Expert Help

If your audit surfaces more than two critical issues, or if you identify critical issues but don't have clear visibility into their root cause, the time cost of resolving them without expert guidance typically exceeds the cost of professional help. Technical SEO errors in particular — crawl configuration issues, JavaScript rendering problems, server-side redirect chains — can look simple on the surface and be deeply complex underneath.

The audit itself is diagnostic. The treatment is a separate decision.